Another life coaching blog on diet and fitness

Scroll down to hear the seven-minute podcast recorded in my car that goes over the essential points in this blog.

As mentioned in previous life coaching blogs, the most popular goal amongst my life coaching clients is losing weight. Sometimes, losing weight quickly. What I want to cover in this quick blog is the importance of committing to wholesale change. Avoid the word diet (which is perceived, whether you know it or not, as something temporary) and focus on a sustainable goal.

Over a decade, I’ve studied health and nutrition to use in my own fitness routines and there have been A LOT of popular diets. Most popularly called ‘fad diets’. Here are some essential and important points to remember when realizing this goal of losing weight:

Avoid fad diets. If your eating style has a name attached to it (e.g. Atkins, Keto, South Beach), you’re on a fad diet. While these diets give tremendous results in a short period of time, this translates to short-lived and isn’t sustainable.

When changing your eating habits, decrease, do not eliminate. If chocolate has been a regular part of your diet, suddenly eliminating chocolate will make your life extremely uncomfortable and you will eventually go back to eating it (sometimes, initially, in larger quantities than you were before!).

The biologically need to consume important nutrients (e.g. carbohydrates, good fats, dairy vitamins) is more powerful than your willpower. Eliminating an important nutrient from your eating habits isn’t sustainable (or healthy!).

If you lose 20 pounds in a month through a fad diet, look forward to gaining that weight back within the next few months. Whatever behavior was used to lose that weight will be corrected by your body’s instinctual need (fad diets are also often called yo-yo diets because your weight goes up and down in short periods of time).